Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama Section Completes Lineup

Program includes strong Asian contingent including Vietnamese sci-fi pic '2030'

LONDON — The Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama section, which is devoted to art-house cinema, with a particular focus on auteur movies, has completed its lineup of fiction pics. It includes 24 world premieres.

The selection has a strong Asian contingent, with several titles from the continent added.

Panorama’s main program will open on Feb. 6 with a Vietnamese sci-fi pic, “2030.” In Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo’s film, the ocean levels have risen and the land of many farmers is now under water. Vegetables are cultivated on floating farms, a catastrophic situation from which global corporations want to profit.

Nao Kubota’s “Homeland” follows a farmer’s son from the Fukushima district of Japan, who has fled to the city. He returns to his home village, which lies in a no-go zone following the nuclear disaster.

In the South Korean film “Night Flight,” LeeSong Hee-il presents a poignantly unsettling duel between two schoolmates in a society deeply disturbed by the pressure to succeed. LeeSong previously showed his films “No Regret” and “White Night” in Panorama.

Chinese director Zhou Hao delivers one of the standout debuts of the festival with “The Night,” whose rough intimacy and confident sense of style is reminiscent of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean Genet or Wong Kar Wai.

Two masters of Hong Kong cinema have joined the lineup: Dante Lam employs the entertaining means of an action film to delve into deep moral issues in “That Demon Within”; and Fruit Chan gives “The Midnight After,” his adaptation of an online novel, a mysterious apocalyptic vibe. Chan made a lasting impression in Berlin with his 2005 Panorama entry, “Dumplings.”

Finally, leading Taiwanese-Malaysian director Tsai Ming-liang will present the next segment of his experimental “Walker” series, entitled “Journey to the West.”

Other pics added include American filmmaker Ira Sachs’ latest work, “Love Is Strange,” starring Alfred Molina, John Lithgow and Marisa Tomei. Sachs previously screened two films in Panorama: “Forty Shades of Blue” in 2005, and “Keep the Lights On” in 2012.

The Panorama Dokumente program, which is for documentary feature pics, will be announced soon.